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A Comparison of Ajax Frameworks for ASP.NET: “As highlighted in this post on the Ajax.NET Professional blog today, there’s a comparison posted of several of the popular Ajax frameworks for those working with ASP.NET (created by Daniel Zeiss). First, let me explain why only these 6 Frameworks are included although there is a lot more AJAX stuff for ASP.NET out there. All the frameworks listed here have one unique AJAX feature: They allow updating page content without programming AJAX directly – i call it indirect AJAX programming – a compareable concept is called Hijax. Therefore, frameworks that supply only controls with built in AJAX-features (Trees, Grids, Lists and so on…) are not included in the comparison. Please forgive me and drop me a note if I forgot a framework that also allows indirect AJAX programming. The list for the comparison includes: ComfortASP.NET V0.45 (beta) MagicAJAX.NET V0.2.2 ComponentArt V3.0 Callback Control and more… He has very detailed charts covering different topics like general information about the package, it’s ASP.NET compatibility, how much “traffic” it generates with its requests, and other additional features. There’s even charts for the traffic (in bytes) for a few different tests he performs with each package. “

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User annotations in Ajax: “IBM developerWorks has posted an Ajax tutorial that allows you to implement user-created sticky notes on your site: The ability to add notes and comments to your Web site can be a powerful and attractive feature for users. This tutorial demonstrates how to implement an Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX)-based …”

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Intuitive Date Input Selection?: ““DateBox is a pure JavaScript library using DHTML and advanced Date parsing to generate the date based on the grammar passed. The purpose of DateBox is to simplify the date entering process using grammatical terms we are all familiar with.” “Intuitive” is such a loaded term but let’s play with it. Is this tool intuitive or […]”

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Spongecell – Ajax Calender: “Spongecell calendar the easiest online planning tool for friends to share Built on the Ruby on Rails…”

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ParticleTree: Preloading Data with Ajax and JSON: “In this article from ParticleTree they take the typical Ajax kinds of connections that everyone else is doing and “step it up a notch” by showing you how to prefetch with Ajax and the help of some JSON. On most sites, there are usually only a handful of options that can be done at any given moment and often some of these options are more likely than others. By determining what is important on each page, we can preload the data of the user’s next action and store it on the client with JSON. When the user decides to perform their next action, they’ll see their results almost instantly because the info was loaded in the background. They start things off with a demo of how the application works (for you to get a feel for it), and include a download to help the learning process along. They describe briefly what JSON is and move directly into the code. They break it up into chunks, describing each piece as it goes along. They use the Prototype library to make the creation of things a bit easier as well. They finish it off with the inclusion of pagination abilities and using the navigation to control it. “

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A Huge List of Javascript Libraries: “Saddam Azad has a huge post over on his blog today with a pretty comprehensive list of Javascript libraries (including Prototype, AjaxAC, Moo.FX, Rico, and Zimbra). They’re seperated out into sections like “Pure JS Application libraries / Frameworks”, “PHP based AJAX Frameworks”, and “Javascript libs for Flash” with several listings underneath each. Most of the entries include not only links to the library’s homepage, but also links to documentation and demos showing what it can do. Of course, there are some comments about ones that are missing, but this huge list provides more than enough links to keep a developer busy for a long time.

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Using Ajax to Improve the Bandwidth Performance of Web Applications : “Christopher Merrill over at webperformance.com wrote up an article on the performance impacts of Ajax development in which he measured bandwidth results for an application using full page refreshes vs. Ajax techniques. The Goal In order to test the theory, we decided to see if we could cut the bandwidth use of an application by at least 50%. We selected a rather simple internal data-analysis application. The application consists of a typical page layout with a central section containing the changing content. The header, footer and navigation menu do not change during the application operation. We modified the application so that it can be accessed in either traditional (page-refresh) mode or AJAX mode. We then used our measurement tool (Web Performance Analyzer) to record and analyze the bandwidth utilization of each application. Conclusion In applications that have a significant part of each page containing content that is identical in multiple page requests, using AJAX-style methods to update only the relevant parts of a web page can bring significant bandwidth savings. Using less than 100 lines of javascript, we were able to quickly convert an existing web application to use AJAX page-update methods to drastically reduce (>60%) the bandwidth requirements of our sample application.

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Software As She’s Developed – AJAX Patterns: Design Patterns for AJAX Usability

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Web Trends 2006 – is yesterday’s news…: “In late-december 2005 I sat down and tried to guess what the future would be like here in 2006 – that is about a month ago. Now, I was imagining that I was being bold, and that life had to, in some mysterious way, get just right for it to actually happen – at least in 2006 instead of 2007… or 2009. I was wrong – terribly wrong! One company changed several of my predictions into yesterday’s news – only 9 days after 2006 had started. Nine freaking days… That company is Apple. I predicted things like ‘The internet as a pipeline is getting started – in the second half of 2006’. But, with Apple’s new photocasting it is already here. This allows you to work in a desktop based environment at both the start and the finish – all connected trough the internet. This is an amazingly good way to utilize the internet as a pipeline. It is also the future of web applications (more on that later). I also predicted that ‘interoperability is the key’, which is very clearly visible in the way Apple’s new iLife applications work together – and more importantly, extends the capabilities of each application. This is a classic example of development on an exponential rate – add one thing and use it for two things (more on that later too).

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New Minimum Font Size: “The good people of Microsoft User Experience and Microsoft Typography have found that the minimum font size used on computer screen is too tiny for modern computer displays. The absolute minimum size used to be Tahoma 8pt (comparable to 11px on Mac OS X or on the web). But, as the average screen display has moved from 640×480 to 1024×786 (and above) the font has simply become intelligible for most people. This evidently caused by that the average screen resolution has increased more rapidly than the use of larger displays. It is a problem that has become profound on most laptops, and noticeable on many desktop systems. To fix this Microsoft has developed a new font – Segoe UI (pronounced, ‘SEE-go’), and changed the minimum from 8pt to 9pt. But, that is not all. The new font has also been designed specifically for ClearType, and has been given a more human appearance than Tahoma. You should care too In May 2004, I wrote an article about the minimum font size you could use on the web. With this, that article, and my recommendation has changed. If you are creating a website, web application or a regular application, you should actively consider using a larger font-size – based on this new knowledge about user experience vs. computer displays.

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